CLEVELAND — Tommy Kahnle is persistent.

The visiting clubhouse at Progressive Field features an arcade-style video-game machine that allows the user to choose from a variety of original Nintendo and Sega games. Kahnle, who will turn 28 next month, is old enough to have remembered the 1990s and played the eight-bit game systems. For two days in the clubhouse, he tried his hand at a variety of the games he played as a kid, more interested and focused on beating the games, more willing to hit reset and begin anew after each failed victory, than anyone else in the clubhouse.

And it is perhaps — in part, at least — that sort of persistence which has allowed a once wild arm DFA’d by the Rockies in November of 2015 to emerge as one of the most dominant relievers in the game. Jeff Sullivan recently investigated Kahnle’s curious and dominant April, and Kahnle has only continued to be something of the Craig Kimbrel of the AL Central.

The only pitcher striking out a greater percentage of batters than Kahnle (47.3%) this season is Kimbrel himself (55.6%).

More exhibits of evidence:

The only pitchers featuring superior K-BB% marks are Kimbrel (50.5 points) and Kenley Jansen (44.8).

The other amazing Kahnle Fact: he has the fourth-lowest zone-contact rate among relievers (71%). Batters both chase out of the zone and struggle to hit him in the zone. It’s an attractive combination. He has now sustained this success for better than a third of the season.

Kanhle has always had good stuff. His four-seam fastball ranks seventh in velocity among relief pitchers’ fastballs, and 31st in whiff-per-swing rate, according to the Baseball Prospectus PITCHf/x leaderboards. He said he throws a traditional four-seam fastball but the pitch has some natural cutting action.

He’s second among reliever in whiff per swing (56%) on his primary secondary offering, a darting changeup.

While his fastball velocity is up from 94.6 mph in 2014 to a career-best 97.9 mph this season, while his changeup has better fading action away from Coors Field as one would expect, the secret to Kahnle’s success actually isn’t a secret at all.

“Getting ahead of hitters, really,” Kahnle told FanGraphs. “It’s tough to get guys out when you are falling behind a lot. It’s even tougher to strike guys out when you are not ahead. I would credit it to me getting ahead and these adjustments to mechanics.”

Kahnle has trimmed his walk rate to a career-low 6.6% this season, down from a 16.6% last season. His career average is 13.1%. His first-pitch strike rate has jumped to 60.4% from 52.8% a season ago, and from 52.3% for his career. His zone percent has increased to 50.5% from 47.3%.

For his career, Kahnle has been ahead of hitters in 214 plate appearances. In 239 plate appearances batters have been ahead of Kahnle. But this season, through Sunday, Kahnle has been ahead in the count 36 times compared to the hitter being ahead 23 times.

Consider the old Kahnle, and this infamous walk-off walk from last June:

And the new Kahnle dotting 100 mph:

With a wipeout changeup:

He’s more often getting heading in counts and is more often producing two-strike anxiety in hitters, as his swinging-strike rate has jumped from 10.8% to 17.0%.

Said Chicago White Sox pitching coach Don Cooper to The Athletic back in April: “The only thing between him and staying here forever is just throwing his fastball, his breaking ball, his change over the plate.”

And Kahnle is throwing his pitches more often over the plate.

Consider the fastballs he threw to left-handed hitters last season:

his season ….

And this season:

Kanhle credits some mechanical changes and work with Cooper to turning his career around. He has worked to lower his leg kick since last season. “I used to come up a little too high… It would cause a lot of things to go on,” Kahnle said. He also tried to have his back leg not dip quite as much as it did earlier in his career, causing him to elevate pitches and get inconsistent with his release point. He also developed a glove “tap” last year to get his “arm out quicker.”

But the most important change, he said, was keeping his head focused longer on its target, the catcher’s glove.

“A lot of people had talked about keeping my head on line, but I had never understood what they meant,” Kahnle said. “I kind of figured it out towards the end of the spring this year.”

Sometimes players don’t understand the language of a coach, sometimes there is a communication gap, and Kahnle said he had to develop a feel for what coaches meant by “staying on line.”

One day in Arizona this spring, he decided he was going to focus on the catcher’s glove as long as his he could. He was going to keep his focus there as close to his release point as he could, until his delivery took him somewhat dramatically to the first-base side of the pitching mound.

“I finally started doing it. I guess it worked,” Kahnle said. “All of the sudden, this year, it started clicking.”

And if Kahnle has really found a new level, if he’s really given the rebuilding White Sox a relief ace on the cheap, then it will be one of the better finds of the 2015-16 offseason.

The story of Kahnle is one of persistence and it’s also one of failure. This a pitcher who, like so many others before him, failed to pitch successfully at Coors Field. It was pitching at Coors that perhaps accelerated Kahnle’s realization that he had to make changes, that he had to be open to significant adjustments.

“Especially when I started to fail in Colorado, I knew I needed to change some things,” Kahnle said. “It was last offseason I really started to work on some things.”

Pitchers shed by the Rockies often come with a discount because they come with messy performance lines. But Collin McHugh figured it out at sea level in Houston after leaving Coors Field, as has Juan Nicasio in Los Angeles and Pittsburgh, as has Drew Pomeranz (at times) in San Diego and Boston. If you were willing to take a project, there was upside in Kahnle. A failed Rockies pitcher with stuff, a willing and persistent experimenter. Kahnle is looking more and more like he’s reached a new level, an elite level.

This is now the third consecutive year in which I’ve written a post about the potential misuse of defensive metrics early in the season. We all want as large a sample size as possible to gather data and make sure what we are looking at is real. That is especially true with defensive statistics, which are reliable, but take longer than other stats to become so.

While the reminder is still a useful one, this year’s edition is a bit different. Past years have necessitated the publication of two posts on UZR outliers. This year, due to the lack of outliers at the moment, one post will be sufficient.

First, let’s begin with an excerpt from the UZR primer by Mitchel Lichtman:

Most of you are familiar with OPS, on base percentage plus slugging average. That is a very reliable metric even after one season of performance, or around 600 PA. In fact, the year-to-year correlation of OPS for full-time players, somewhat of a proxy for reliability, is almost .7. UZR, in contrast, depending on the position, has a year-to-year correlation of around .5. So a year of OPS data is roughly equivalent to a year and half to two years of UZR.

Last season, I identified 10 players whose defensive numbers one-third of the way into the season didn’t line up with their career numbers: six who were underperforming and four who were overperforming. The players in the table below were all at least six runs worse than their three-year averages from previous seasons. If they had kept that pace, they would have lost two WAR in one season just from defense alone. None of those six players kept that pace, and all improved their numbers over the course of the season.

The next table depicts the guys who appeared to be overperforming early on. If these players were to keep pace with their early-season exploits, the rest-of-season column would be double the one-third column. Brandon Crawford actually came fairly close to reaching that mark; nobody else did, however, as the other three put up worse numbers over the last two-thirds of the season than they had in its first third.

Just like with the underperfomers, all four of overperformers had recorded defensive marks six runs off their established levels. Replicating those figures over the rest of the season would have meant a two-win gain on defense alone. Again, no one accomplished that particular feat.

A funny thing happened when I ran the numbers for this season. There weren’t any outliers of a magnitude similar to last season or the season before. It’s possible you missed the announcement at the end of April, but there have been some changes made to UZR to help improve the metric.

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After the White Sox traded Chris Sale, rumors flew that Jose Quintana would be on the move soon, as well. Quintana has been quite good for Chicago, but the club had no designs on contending in 2017. With four more years of control at under $40 million, Quintana was a valuable trade chip. The White Sox were right to expect a return for Quintana that rivaled their hauls for Chris Sale and Adam Eaton. Those demands weren’t met, however, and the White Sox entered the season with Quintana as their ace.

Looking at Quintana’s line so far this season — he has a 5.60 ERA and 4.28 FIP — it’s hard to imagine that his current trade value remains as high as it was this offseason. The main problem has been home runs. Let’s take a closer look.

First, some good news: Quintana has actually increased his strikeout rate relative to previous seasons. That mark stands at to 23.0% currently, higher than his career average of 20.1% and last year’s 21.6%. His walks have gone up, too, though: up to 8.6% from his career average and last year’s average around 6%. A 40% increase in walks is definitely something to note, but more alarming is Quintana’s home-run rate. Here are Quintana’s relevant home-run statistics during his career:

Quintana has been pitching in a tough pitcher’s park for the duration of his career, so the regularity with which he’s suppressed home runs would appear to be a bit of a skill at this point. That said, there’s definitely been a departure this season from his established levels. His walks seem to indicate he’s not quite the pitcher he has been, but a lot of other indicators check out. His velocity seems decent enough. He’s getting first-pitch strikes. He’s pitching in the zone roughly the same amount and swings in and out of the zone don’t seem overly alarming. The home runs are only a big deal to the extent they have a tangible effect on Quintana’s stat line.

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When you look up and see that the Athletics are in the midst of a two-game mid-week series against the Marlins in late May, you might suspect that the major-league baseball schedule is simply an exercise in randomness. At this point in the campaign, that’s actually sort of the case. The combination of interleague play and the random vagaries of an early-season schedule conspire to mean that your favorite team hasn’t had the same schedule as your least favorite team. Let’s try to put a number on that disparity.

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What makes Andrew Miller so good? There’s a variety of contributing reasons — there’s the velocity, the fastball, the slider, the delivery, the body, the mentality, and so on and so on. Every part of Miller comes together to make him nearly perfect. But, what’s the mechanism? What’s the statistical explanation for Miller’s dominance? In essence, he warps the hitter’s idea of the strike zone. Hitters don’t swing at many strikes, and they swing at too many balls. They have the statistical discipline of bad-hitting pitchers.

So far this season, Miller has gotten opponents to swing at pitches out of the zone 43% of the time. Once again, that’s super high — by O-Swing%, Miller ranks second in baseball. There’s one guy in front of him. That one guy is Anthony Swarzak?

Sure, why not. It’s 31-year-old journeyman and minor-league-contract acquisition Anthony Swarzak, pitching out of the White Sox bullpen. I’ve already written about how Tommy Kahnle is overachieving. Now here’s Swarzak, too, basically out of nowhere. I’ve got a plot for you.

That’s Swarzak in red. Compared to last year, his O-Swing% against has improved by 14 percentage points, and his Contact% against has improved by 15 percentage points. So Swarzak is way, way out there, having now adjusted well to full-time relief. Let me take that back; Swarzak has mostly relieved for a while. First he was a starter. Then he was a swingman. Last year, with the Yankees, Swarzak for the first time dramatically increased his slider rate, overtaking his number of fastballs. Swarzak has kept that up in 2017. The difference this time around is in location. The Yankees got Swarzak to change his pitch mix rather aggressively. The White Sox have gotten Swarzak to focus on one specific area around the plate.

From Baseball Savant:

Last season, Swarzak threw 63% of his pitches to the glove-side half, which was one of the higher rates around. This season, Swarzak has thrown 85% of his pitches to the glove-side half, which ties him for the highest rate in the league. The next-closest pitcher trails by more than 10 percentage points. Swarzak works righties away, all the time. He works lefties inside, all the time. He throws his fastball to the glove-side, and he throws his slider to the glove-side. His locations have gotten precise, and consistent, and hitters haven’t really known what to do.

In January, Anthony Swarzak was basically nothing. I’m going to guess he signed with the White Sox because he figured there he stood a better chance of getting a big-league opportunity. He was right! And for a month and a half he’s been one of baseball’s more effective relievers. I don’t know what to tell you. This is our shared reality. How about Anthony Swarzak?

One of the classic criticisms of the front-page entries on FanGraphs is that it can sometimes look like writers are just scanning different leaderboards until they find a subject. Now, there’s nothing actually wrong with that, I don’t think. That’s why the leaderboards exist — so we can all learn from what they say. It’s not like we can easily and automatically keep track of everything by ourselves. Still, I understand where the criticism comes from. And so I’d like to be up front here: This post is about something I didn’t expect to see on a leaderboard. There’s no deeper inspiration. But when I saw a player’s line, I knew I couldn’t not write about it.

In the early going this season, the White Sox have been a pleasant surprise! They’re hanging tight with the Indians, and they’re well ahead of, say, the Royals. One element that’s driven the White Sox has been the pitching staff, and, specifically, the bullpen. Even coming into the year, the team had Nate Jones and David Robertson, so the bullpen wasn’t likely to be terrible. To this point, it’s second out of all big-league bullpens in ERA-. It’s first in K-BB%. That…isn’t what anyone expected. And now, a plot.

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Cleveland’s got a good pitching staff. It’s part of what got them to the World Series last year, and it’s what they’re hoping to ride to another playoff berth. They’re blessed with excellent arms like Corey Kluber, Andrew Miller, Carlos Carrasco, Cody Allen and Danny Salazar.

Michael Martinez is not, by trade, a pitcher. He’s technically a hitter, but his career 33 wRC+ doesn’t exactly support that claim very well. The best way to describe Martinez from a job description standpoint would be to say that he’s a fielder, a utilityman, perhaps. He’s a survivor, who’s managed to stick on big league rosters in some capacity since 2011 despite being a nearly nonexistent asset at the plate. Martinez is the ultimate 25th man, who will be forever emblazoned in the visuals of history by making the out that won the Cubs their first World Series in more than a century. One of the jobs of a 25th man is to do anything that is required of him. And that means that in certain situations he’s a pitcher, too.

Cleveland was losing 10-4 to Chicago in the ninth inning last night, following a disastrous outing from Josh Tomlin. Rather than burn another reliever, Terry Francona turned to Martinez, his trusty 25th man. For the first time in his big league career, he took the mound. Martinez had somehow avoided the task until now, despite being the last man on the bench for some bad Phillies teams. The only other time he’d pitched was all the way back in A-ball in 2007, when he’d gotten into two games and totaled 1.2 innings of work. He did not allow a hit in either outing, because A-ball is a magical place.

The big leagues are not A-ball. The big leagues are full of hitters who sneeze at A-ball pitching, and one or two who hit like Michael Martinez. Everyone on the White Sox is technically a big league hitter. Yet we can all agree that there are more difficult assignments than innings composed of Carlos Sanchez, Omar Narvaez, Leury Garcia, and Tim Anderson.

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Two seasons ago, Kris Bryant was regarded by many as the top prospect in all of baseball. After having dominated all levels of the minors, he appeared to be a candidate to begin the season on the Cubs’ 25-man roster. The conditions were nearly ideal. Not only had Bryant proven himself in the minors, but the club possessed no one of consequence to start at third. Furthermore, the Cubs intended to contend in the NL Central.

Despite all the arguments in favor of Bryant breaking camp with the Cubs, he was sent to Iowa. He waited a week and a half, at which point the team called him up. He proceeded to have a great season. By waiting to promote him, though — a decision that wasn’t without some controversy — the Cubs ensured that Bryant wouldn’t be a free agent until after 2021 instead of 2020.

The Chicago White Sox’ Yoan Moncada, named the top prospect in baseball recently by Eric Longenhagen, deserves (and doesn’t deserve) the same fate. Allow me to explain.

The Chicago Cubs “generously” gave Kris Bryant a $1 million dollar salary this season when they could have given him close to half, but that is nothing compared to the potentially tens of millions of dollars they stand to gain by having Bryant’s services in 2021. One year of a great player in his prime — and Bryant will be 29 years old in 2021 — is incredibly valuable. The cost of six wins on the free-agent market is roughly $50 million. Such a large figure might seem improbable at first: no players receive $50 million salaries and some six-win players (David Price and Max Scherzer, for example) do hit free agency. However, those players sign multi-year deals, often receiving the same salary in Year One as Year Seven despite the fact that expected production in that first season greatly exceeds that of the latter years of a contract. The production and salary are expected to average out by the end of a deal, with overpayments in later years compensating for underpayments in the earlier ones. The point here — and one that makes sense even in the absence of the math — is that one extra year of a player’s services can be incredibly valuable.

As for what such a young and talented player deserves in terms of compensation, there are a lot of ways to attack the concept. Kris Bryant deserved to be on the Opening Day roster in 2015 due to his play. Unfortunately, that play — and the promise it suggested — rendered Bryant too valuable for the Cubs not to manipulate his service time. Therefore, they waited those 10 days.

That isn’t a great system. It creates disincentives, even if very small, to putting the best team on the field. But it’s the system under which MLB is operating presently. And it matters right now because of Yoan Moncada.

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Tim Anderson and the Chicago White Sox have agreed to an extension that will pay the young shortstop $25 million over six years and which includes two team options that could double the amount of the contract.

The deal is both big and small. It’s the largest contract ever given to an MLB player with less than a year of service time. So that’s significant. On the other hand, the contract also figures to pay Anderson an average annual value that equates to an amount less than deals signed this winter by Boone Logan and Mitch Moreland. If Anderson doesn’t progress as a major-league player and is out of the league in a couple years, he’ll have at least made $25 million — a substantial figure, in other words. If Anderson is good, then the White Sox will have themselves a huge bargain.

Contracts like Anderson’s aren’t very common. While extensions are signed with some frequency by players who’ve recorded a year-plus of service time — and occur with similar frequency for players at each year of service time until free agency — that’s not the case for players like Anderson, who have little experience in the majors.

Consider: since 2010, there have been 143 extensions of three or more years given to players who’ve recorded less than six years of service time, per MLB Trade Rumors. Of those deals, Tim Anderson’s is just the fifth signed by a player with less than a year of service time. That’s a rarity, as the graph below reveals.

As to why these contract extensions are so rare, one likely explanation is the lack of incentive for a team to pursue a deal any earlier. While extensions such as these can certainly represent bargains for team — and while teams certainly like bargains — clubs can frequently secure players for similar terms after a year or two of play. That allows them to gather more information about the player in question.

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In 2017, I am probably more interested in Adam Eaton than I am any other player in baseball. As the centerpiece of a controversial blockbuster, coming off a monster season where a lot of his value was tied a huge swing in his defensive value, Eaton was always going to be a fascinating experiment for paying a perceived premium price for outfield defense. But it gets even more interesting, because the Nationals are switching him from right field back to center field, so we throw a position switch in the mix as well, and get another data point on whether his weird splits between RF and CF actually mean anything.

So when the MLBAM guys released their outfield catch probability leaderboard last weekend, Eaton was naturally one of the first players to examine. And when Jeff took an early look at the published 2015-2016 data, he found that Eaton ranked seventh in Catch+, or whatever we might want to call plays made above the averages of the buckets they had opportunities in. And when he looked at the catch data relative to the range portions of UZR and DRS, he actually found that the Statcast data showed that Eaton had the largest positive difference, suggesting that, by hang time and distance traveled variables, Eaton may have been even better defensively than the public defensive metrics thought.

So yeah, Eaton is really interesting. But the more I dig into Eaton’s defensive data, the more remarkable it all gets.

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